Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara is like a flashback to this decade's monster Bollywood blockbuster Gadar. Three years after the Anil Sharma-Sunny Deol dynamo made box-office history, an Indian hero has fallen for a Pakistani lass—again. He still spends much of the screen time—22 years here—in enforced separation, only to get united at the end of a protracted saga.

But a lot has changed in the three years since Gadar. The Kargil rancour has ebbed. General Pervez Musharraf smiles at us sometimes. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh doesn't smile a lot, he's a serious man, so he is reciprocating by being seriously friendly with Gen Musharraf. And through Veer-Zaara, the audiences from either side of the border are being united in big, collective sobs (see box). A turnaround from Gadar, where lines like "Hindustan Pakistan ka baap hai...(India is Pakistan's father)" were reciprocated with catcalls by Indians, but met with deafening silence from the Pakistanis.

There's nothing like crying together—it helps exorcise your demons and cleanse your soul. Is that what Bollywood is trying? For long, our films played on the animus against Pakistan, their plots hinging on duels between "them" and "us", with films like Border, Sarfarosh and Pukaar. "Indian cinema has had this severed-sibling feeling for Pakistan, a love-hate, horror-fascination relationship," says Shohini Ghosh of Jamia Millia Islamia's Mass Communication Research Centre.

"Then Gadar opened the wounds of Partition, it was jarring," says sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. Anti-Pak sentiment reached its peak in the form of a blatant cinematic idiom built on unbridled physical and spoken violence.

But things were changing. The first indication that the Gadar brand of hate-talk was passe came with LOC, where abuse hurled at the neighbours didn't get an applause from the audience. Lakshya treated the "enemy" with respect, and signalled the demise of the Indo-Pak war movie.

"It's the post-script to Kargil. The thaw is reflected in the metaphor of friendship and love," says media analyst Sudheesh Pachauri. "From confrontation we're moving to reconciliation," adds Ghosh.

Chopra says he hadn't planned for the film to release in the current atmosphere of peace; still, he believes there can be no feasible relationship between the two countries besides friendship. "We are, basically, one people," says Chopra. And, he thinks, that though cinema may not be able to solve problems, "it's a strong tool to create a favourable atmosphere".

Having lived through Partition, Chopra tried creating such an atmosphere once through Dharamputra (1961), the story of a Muslim child brought up in a Hindu family. "It was a radical film, against religious barriers," says Ghosh. Forty-three years later he's done it again in Veer-Zaara, albeit as an out-and-out romance—soft focus, cloyingly sweet and mushy.

Chopra thinks a socio-political consciousness is important for a filmmaker. "But I can only deal with it in the paradigm of human relationships. So, we touched upon human concerns. Everything is subservient to the love between Veer and Zaara," he says. A trait it shares with Randhir Kapoor's Henna (1991), where the tagline was: "God made land, man made boundaries." Last year, Chandraprakash Dwivedi's Pinjar was a similar "love-in-the-time-of-Partition" effort, but Amrita Pritam's deft story got lost in the convoluted politics of the film's narrative.

But Chopra doesn't deal with politics at all. So don't even think of M.S. Sathyu's Garam Hawa here. Strange things happen in Veer-Zaara. The Pakistani heroine easily crosses borders and goes on a conducted tour of the hero's village and the hero is just as easily put behind bars for being a raw agent. The heroine has to be a Pakistani who can be "brought over" to the Indian fold.But, if in Gadar, bringing the girl across became a matter of scoring over the Pakistanis, here she is a link with which to reach out to them.

Visvanathan finds the film fascinating precisely because it sticks to Bollywood's conventions and yet offers new surprises. Since it's an Indian film, the villain has to be from Pakistan but his identity is more of a jilted lover than a Pakistani. "The evil is distributed, there are no real demons in the film," says Visvanathan.

In fact, Indians and Pakistanis are nice human beings. The hero is willing to die for the heroine. The heroine will come all the way to Kiratpur in India for the immersion of her Sikh grandmother's ashes. She talks gender equality and a Pakistani lawyer is a human rights activist.

Funnily, Veer-Zaara's peace premise works because it's not a great film. It isn't remotely deep and yet is peculiarly moving and poignant. "If we keep it simple, we reach out to more people," explains Chopra. In fact, it is more a celebration of the all-embracing goodness of "people", not the divisiveness of "nations".

"Pakistan here is like a lost neighbour," says Visvanathan. "It's like a family trying to reconfigure itself through the Veer-Zaara alliance. It's as though Pakistan, with its political autonomy, is actually the lost other of the Indian self," says Visvanathan.

However, Veer-Zaara's appeal has been much quieter in comparison to the havoc unleashed by Gadar. The halls might be full but the frenzy is not as palpable. Released with a mind-boggling 700 prints, it has done 95 per cent business and accumulated enough in its first week to be declared a "big hit", says Indu Mirani, associate editor, Box Office. But will it turn into a craze? Will it give us a new myth of Indo-Pak brotherhood?

Santosh Desai, president, McCann Erickson, feels the current filmi friendship doesn't deny the other, inflexible emotion of hostility. "These feelings come and go in cycles," he says.

Visvanathan is hopeful. "It's widening the possibilities of collectivity, of the similarities between India and Pakistan, making borders porous," he says. Who knows we may soon have an Indian film where an Indian girl will fall in love with a Pakistani man. The location, however, may not be India. But for such positive bilateral negotiations even a London should do.